Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 23, 2014 @10:36AM
from the lot-of-ocean-out-there dept.

Bloomberg News reports that "French satellite scans provided fresh indications of objects adrift in part of the Indian Ocean that's being scoured for the missing Malaysian airliner, backing up Chinese evidence as more planes and ships join the hunt. ... The developments rekindled prospects for a breakthrough in the mystery of Malaysian Air (MAS) Flight 370 after radar and visual scans failed to find objects spotted in earlier images taken from space. Searchers, bolstered by a growing fleet of international vessels, also want to locate a wooden pallet seen from the air to check if it could have come from the jet's hold."
And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting."

But beyond that there's really nothing to it. It is what it is one the face. People can speculate but the truth is that the disarmament treaty that Ukraine signed had no teeth to ensure sovereignty was protected. Outside of any implications this might have regarding nuclear proliferation there's not much more of interest to it.

yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found

Well, the ocean is a big place, and generally devoid of radar. The airliner almost certainly had ADS-B and that can be tracked by satellite (though I have no idea if there is coverage over the southern Indian Ocean). The problem is that when the crew deliberately turns it off or it fails, what are you going to do?

A breakaway ELT would make a lot of sense. Heck, you can buy them for personal use these days - not that it would do the passengers much good if the pilot were determined to commit suicide.

A PLB would be handy if you actually got out of the plane though, which is really the only time you as a still-living individual will care about being located anyway.

By breakaway I mean an externally-located device designed to detach if the plane sinks and float on the surface.

There are other options as well - like a device that detects deceleration, rapid descent, or other abnormal conditions and transmits the plane's location. With satellite monitoring you don't really need that to even survive long - if

We're fixated on the technological fixes- emergency locator beacons, satellite tracking devices. So why are so few people talking about the obvious: the psychology of the crew? Whoever hijacked this airplane was familiar with piloting a 777 and familiar with the route, which points to the pilot or the copilot stealing their own plane, then deliberately crashing it in the Indian Ocean.

This would not be the first pilot suicide, either; EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir 185 are both believed to be pilot suicide.

Aircraft safety is getting close to the point where pilots cause more problems than they resolve. If you made aircraft completely autonomous I'm not convinced that it would decrease the safety of flying at all. It would probably change the liability picture, however.

It is only a matter of time before cars are in the same position.

Oh, and it is ridiculous that the cockpit voice recorder only lasts two hours. They should make it illegal to access except by the NTSB/etc, and make it last the full flight dur

In flight accidents and crashes have the lowest survival rates. That's just a simple fact due to the forces involved. Those that survive the impact are likely to have sustained fatal injuries that will kill them if they aren't in intensive care within hours.

So the major reason is not the rescue effort but the recovery of the recording devices to check and see if the problem was mechanical or human error.

Besides disabling it on-ground, the concern is that anything on the main bus needs to be able to be powered off in case of an electrical problem. If that transmitter develops a short it could take out the entire bus, start a fire, etc. That's the concept at least - certainly there are workarounds.

Wreckage of AF447 (including bodies) was found within the first couple of days, so they knew for certain there was a water impact and approximately where. It took time to find the main wreckage, but it was located, and in fact new analysis of sonar data collected by a French sub within the first week after the crash was critical in finding it. The sonar had heard the FDR pings, but it was below the equipment's identification threshold at the time.

In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate. The linked article is a bad rehash of 3rd party information - it's generic mainstream "news" to sell ads to people who can't tell the difference between a well researched detailed story and a piece of abstracted reworded junk.

This article has the picture released by China [nypost.com], coordinates are stamped on the picture: 90deg 13' 43" E / 44deg 57' 29" S. Those positions are now dated due to expected drift of any debris in the local currents and wind.

In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate.

Jup. Pretty much all reporting on this is abysmal, from painfully simplified to just plain wrong and misleading.

One thing I haven't seen correct in any non-aviation specific publication:
The aircraft didn't send pings to the Inmarsat satellite, it replied
to pings by the Inmarsat satellite. It's an important detail:
That's why we know the roundtrip times.

Is it common for the headline to have lists of things and be in the format like "French, Chinese" instead of "French and Chinese"? I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

Great comment.

In English headline writing, using 'headlinese' it's traditional to take liberties with the language that wouldn't normally be allowed. This dates back to newspapers, when the number of characters available to you for a headline might have been reduced due to the large typefaces or the desire to create impact to sell a newspaper - So you would have seen headlines like this one, or oddities like:

SATELLITES SIGHT DEBRIS: CHINESE

The tradition continues today, even though it's largely an online world.

In English headline writing, using 'headlinese' it's traditional to take liberties with the language that wouldn't normally be allowed.

Another reason this is done is to confuse you into taking an interest in the article's contents (so you can figure out what the headline actually means). Especially when it is a front page headline, where such confusion might involve buying a copy of the newspaper.

Is it common for the headline to have lists of things and be in the format like "French, Chinese" instead of "French and Chinese"? I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

Using the comma gets the same information across with less words/space used.

I suspect that similar things are done by newspapers all over the world as long as the language in use supports such "compression".

It''s called "telegraphic speech", as if the writer didn't want to pay for the extra characters.

Newspapers do it for space: the bigger the typeface, the less room for text.

I suspect it carries over to internet articles because of cognitive side-effects: if every headline was a complete sentence they would take more effort on the readers' part. You want something that will instantly grab (or lose) a reader's attention without any mental effort on their part.

historically, the "without a trace" missing aircraft were much smaller, couple cases with 90 passenger the biggest I can find. so this is someone newsworthy just due to size of craft.

but it is amusing to see how people think all aircraft everywhere are continually "tracked by radar" (see, this website does that!), and they wonder why it takes days to go to a place where satellites have spotted debris

they've been trained by TV entertainment to think all problems can be resolved in one hour less commercials.

the maintenance system only sent brief messages not designed to be tracked every 30 minutes.

there is no continuous tracking of most commercial jet aircraft

As for your nonsense about "missile across planet to target cell phone", no, hellfire missiles with range of all of 8 km were used....local assets necessary, not applicable in any way shape or form to problem of plane missing over open sea.

Jet is missing, not a regular occurrence but this is not a world-changing event that warrants such extensive coverage. This disappearance will not affect many lives or change the course of history. Enough already.

What annoys me more is how every day that someone or some government sees a piece of trash in the ocean from satellite images, it's pushed as headliner news with absurd speculation lasting for hours that it could be a breakthrough in the search... Until inevitably it's confirmed to not be airplane wreckage. I'm not against news coverage, but at this point the media seems to be drumming up every little thing in an effort to keep the hysteria around the story alive. This article is just the latest in the cyc

What annoys me more is how every day that someone or some government sees a piece of trash in the ocean from satellite images, it's pushed as headliner news with absurd speculation lasting for hours that it could be a breakthrough in the search... Until inevitably it's confirmed to not be airplane wreckage

This. A wooden pallet? It's like people think the surface of the ocean is pristine and doesn't have any sort of other debris floating on it at all. I would wager one random wooden pallet has a 100% chance of not being from MH370.

We're talking about a vast search area, maybe the size of Texas or larger, depending on how generous you want to be in drawing the boundaries. What are the odds that you cover an area that large with satellites and don't find *something* floating? Whether it's from the plane seems less likely. What are the odds that over two weeks after the plane crashes into the ocean, wreckage is still afloat? In rough water, it will tend to break up, fill with water, and sink. There's also the possibility that the pilot

is that it could take a couple of YEARS of searching, to actually locate this aircraft and get explanations for the families to what happened. It is unrealistic to expect it to be found next week or something. It took 2 years to locate the Air France Flight 447 fuselage underwater and they had a pretty reasonable idea where it was likely to be... they found significant debris about 5 days after it went down.

I agree that it seems like this is a perfect use for drones, and the image recognition algorithms they have developed...

It seems a little far-fetched, but it's not too hard to imagine a future where we have drones monitoring large areas of the oceans all the time. We could then have constantly updating information about what was already in the ocean, so if something like this happened we would know what was new vs having to look at every bit of debris. It also would be useful in tacking down boats lost at

I'm not aware of any production military drones that have that kind of endurance/range. There are things like solar-powered prop drones that can stay aloft for a very long time, but they are slow, and I imagine that they go where the wind blows (winds aloft can be 50mph+, so a slow aircraft can't really maintain position).

Google suggests that the range of a predator is only 1100 miles. That wouldn't even be a round-trip to the search area.

Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation? Is there any part of the ocean where it is not possible to actually locate human debris such as wood pallets scraps of metal and such.

Remember: we still have tons (literally) of trash from the tsunami floating around out there.

Beyond that, why do ALL the media outlets take government statements such as "possible object", meaning the analysts can't agree that there is an actual thing there and the spot isn't just a light glare, and instead report "it could be a wing". From 'not sure it exists' to 'it could be the plane'.

This all seems like the Washington DC sniper investigation and the "white van" syndrome all over again.

Is there any part of the ocean where it is not possible to actually locate human debris such as wood pallets scraps of metal and such.

One thing that astonished me on reading Shackleton's "South", about his expedition that ended in 1916, was that he found an assortment of rubbish such as broken planks of wood and portions of crates washed into an inlet on the South Coast of South Georgia. It mostly wasn't specific shipwreck rubbish but rubbish in general. The search area is almost as far south as South Geo

In the same way that Portland, Oregon is almost as far north as Edmonton, Canada, or Barcelona, Spain is almost as far north as Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK. Funny how lack of land skews your perception, isn't it?

Yes. Lot's of stuff is floating around the ocean. It seems particularly unlikely that large pieces of aircraft fuselage are floating in the ocean, over two weeks after the plane went down, and after heavy storms. The satellite is probably finding wales, bits of long cap-sized ships, sea weed, parts of shipping containers lost at sea, etc. This is the third or fourth time in this search that the satellites have found objects at sea that have not come from MH370.

Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation?

Quite possible - I'm sure there is other junk on the water. The other issue is that there aren't exactly tons of satellites flying around, and when they're zoomed in sufficiently to actually see debris they can't image a very large area. Basically you can capture a long stripe of data which is only so wide but as long as you want it to be. If the image is only a half-mile wide, and the search area is 100 miles in every direction, then you need 200 passes to image it. Of course, nothing prevents debris f

Beyond that, why do ALL the media outlets take government statements such as "possible object", meaning the analysts can't agree that there is an actual thing there and the spot isn't just a light glare, and instead report "it could be a wing". From 'not sure it exists' to 'it could be the plane'.

Cuz that sell eyeballs? Which is more attract to Joe Public - "It could be a wing!" or "Meh, likely nothing found"?

Do you still have that quaint idea that "news" is for informing people and reporters are supposed to be objective and level-headed, or even, (gasp!) competent in subject knowledge being reported? It hasn't been that way for at least decades already.

"And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting.""